


A is for Armor

by Toastybluetwo



Series: Dragon Age Alphabet - Dagna [1]
Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-14
Updated: 2012-01-14
Packaged: 2017-10-29 11:48:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/319586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toastybluetwo/pseuds/Toastybluetwo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a meme going around concerning writing wee ficlets for certain Dragon Age characters based on the letters of the alphabet. Here's my exploration of Dagna, which includes a lot of my own headcanon, since we know so little about her.</p><p>Armor can be physical or metaphysical. To Dagna, it's been both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A is for Armor

A is for Armor

“Outside of this door, they’ll eat you alive,” Janar said to Dagna. Time after time, as she sat on her chair, her head in her hands, he would point to the door of their shop. “Your caste will protect you. Your mother and I will protect you. Anyone else? Their loyalty is worth a nug’s ass. No matter what the Paragons bless your hands to do, no matter how sharp and strong the last weapon you put in their hands is, they’ll toss you in the lava if you so much as forget to bow. Don’t you forget it.”

She didn’t want to believe him. She couldn’t believe him. They weren’t Dusters – and what was so bad about the Dust Town inhabitants anyway? They were just poor and hungry. Most of them weren’t mean. Some of them were outright kind when she’d give them a coin or two, or share her lunch, or even said hello when she didn’t have either in her pockets.

She liked to look people in the eyes. She liked to make them smile with a smile of her own.

Dagna and her parents weren’t of noble blood. The nobles didn’t seem so bad, come to think of it. Sure, they lived in their own little district, in houses much nicer than hers, with servants and…other things. Gold? That wasn’t so uncommon in her life; she and her parents shaped gold into curls and whirls and placed them on weapons and armor. The nobles liked such details. Granted, they rarely spoke to her or her parents unless they wanted to speak specifically of their work, but the nobles were busy, weren’t they? They just didn’t have time to chat. Right?

But, until the years had passed and she had left Orzammar far behind, she was not capable of seeing the privilege of being an artisan, especially of being a blacksmith. Dagna knew that her family’s trade was critical to the continuing defense of Orzammar against the darkspawn.

She had no idea that, in a way, being a blacksmith gave her immunity to the maelstrom of politics and betrayals among the artisans, twisting upward to branches that held the noble houses, and reaching down, down in roots that encompass and entangled Dust Town.

After her father’s lecture – the same lecture, so many times over the years – she would return to the forge to collect her thoughts and to busy herself. As long as she did not look idle, Janar rarely continued the discussion once it had twined downward into its logical conclusion.

In her sixteenth year, the year that she met the Warden-Commander of Ferelden and her companions, Janar had given Dagna a few scraps of strong steel in order to design, and later forge, a breastplate of her own. Dagna tried to muster the enthusiasm to do something out of the ordinary with this steel. After all, this was a privilege to be allowed to make such a thing. She wasn’t born among the warrior caste; she wouldn’t be on the front lines of the war against the Darkspawn. There was no true need for her to own a breastplate. This, however, presented a golden opportunity for her to demonstrate both her talent and her training in a way that was not guided or ordered. Her imagination presented the only obstacle.

No. That was not it. As she stared at the steel helplessly, turning the pieces over and over in her rough, capable hands, she realized that this wasn’t merely an obstacle in her mind, but a blockade of ten tons of rock, dust, and Darkspawn corpses. Such a thing was common in her world, and the Deep Roads beyond. Even at the tender age of sixteen, she recognized the problem. Other young people her own age bemoaned similar fates – being born to a trade and a caste one had no interest in. Yet, in time, they simply realized that there was no point in struggling against the inevitable. It wasn’t all bad, right? The caste provided certainty as much as it did protection. To be a jeweler, or a blacksmith, or a potter meant that you’d always have a job. The nobles always needed armor, pretty rings, and plates to consume their feasts from.

Certainty was a good thing.

Right?

Dagna shoved the steel into the forge, using her tools to melt it into a red-hot liquid.

She should have been grateful for the certainty given to her, freely, by the ancestors. But why did this certainty feel like chains, wrapped around her thick wrists and scarred hands, pulling her down, down to meet the Stone itself?

It was just as she raised her head, staring past the forge, past the walls around her, past the comforts of the Stone and the certainty of the smith caste, that she heard her mother call her to their evening meal.

With a decisive jerk, she drew the steel out of the forge, poured it into a mould that she had used more times than she could recall, and cooled it with great quantities of water. The steam bathed her and formed her decision. There was no turning back now. There would be nothing remarkable about this armor, formed in a mold that formed the standard issue that the guardsmen wore.

The next day, she met the Warden-Commander outside of her father’s shop.

The armor went unfinished.

It remained in the mold until the day that Janar died.


End file.
